Hyde Park Urbanist

Overpass

This is probably in France, where my sister in Texas says they've "taken a lichen to moss farming".  (Yes, her puns are a reason we live in different states.)

Yglesias on Gentrification

I'm going to quote Matthew Yglesias at great length here because it's so germane to our community and because I don't see how I could have put it any better.  Emphasis is mine:

...in an ideal world, improving the neighborhood should actually improve the lives of many of the people who currently live in the neighborhood. The fear is that improving the neighborhood actually just means making it the case that the people who live there will no longer be able to afford to live there. This is a very real concern, but I hasten to add that a lot of the most commonly proposed countermeasures aren’t very effective or are at times counterproductive.

The main thing you need to do is recognize that this kind of bad gentrification is a relative scarcity issue. It’s very expensive to live in low-crime walkable transit-accessible neighborhoods featuring good public schools because housing in such neighborhoods is in short supply. To reduce the cost of housing in such neighborhoods there are a few things you need to do. One is that where you have neighborhoods with some of those characteristics you need to allow for denser construction of housing units. Another is that you need to work on the social policy problems of crime and school performance in existing walkable urban neighborhoods. And a third is that you need to build more transit lines and transit nodes and ensure that such nodes as exist have “smart” (i.e., dense, walkable, mixed use) development around them. And a fourth is to not waste the opportunities that we have — there’s a giant open-air parking lot right by the Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station in DC, which is just a dumbly low-intensity use of land adjacent to scarce Metro stations.

Long story short, the greatest villains of these kinds of stories aren’t the gentrifiers so much as the folks living in the already very nice areas who’ve tried to “pull up the ladder” and boost their own property values by choking development in the parts of the metro area where they live.

A gentrification phenomenon that sort of mixes the two kinds of concerns is that there’s a tendency for a neighborhood that gets far enough along the gentrification cycle to stop having “cool,” interesting stores, bars, and restaurants. This needs to be understood as a consequence of high retail rents. Simply put, it’s much easier to run an interesting retail business in places where rents are low. This is one of the main reasons why most of the best Asian food in the DC area is in random strip malls in Northern Virginia — both the central city retail space and the prime NoVa mall space are too expensive. Very high rents lead to homogenization, chains, mediocrity, high prices, etc. To some extent this is unavoidable, but it certainly counts as a reason why cities should try to ensure that there’s ample space zoned for retail and not stifle people with unduly burdensome business licensing rules. Your city will be more fun if you make it relatively cheap and easy to open stores.

Right.  More commercial space equals more choices equals more satisfaction.  More housing equals more choices equals more affordable housing.  The law of supply and demand is fundamental to our economic life, whether it's housing or commerce or parking.

Yglesias skipped issues revolving around race today but someday I may get brave enough to wade in.

Passive Houses

Passive houses are nearly hermetically sealed so heat cannot escape.  Ventilation is provided thru a heat exchange system where outgoing warm air passes next to incoming cold air, passing along up to 90% of the warmth.  Germany and the Scandinavian countries are the early leaders in building passive houses, but this NYTimes article suggests America will see them soon.  I'm kinda thinking Chicagoans might appreciate seeing their heating bills cut to 5% for an upfront investment of under 10% of the price of a normal house.

Petty Cheating in Gladwell's Outliers

I enjoyed reading Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, who's also written The Tipping Point and Blink. Gladwell argues in Outliers that our culture greatly affects the opportunities available to us and that success relies just as much on opportunities as it does on talent.  But Gladwell could just as easily have argued that violating social norms and petty cheating figure prominently in success.

Bill Joy, who's given credit for writing much of the underlying UNIX code, was a talented & driven college student. Not that grades figured prominently among his motivations; he was fanatical about programming, which was mostly extracurricular.  Timing was critical to his success-- he happened to be attending the University of Michigan in 1971 when that school jumped out to a leader in the field of computation.  And competition wasn't cheap.  Students were limited by the rules to just a certain amount of computer time which Joy & friends got around by hacking the process. (Outliers, p.45-6)

Bill Gates was obsessed with programming at an even earlier age and Gladwell quotes him talking about what early computing experiences at the firm of a friend's mom (Outliers, p.52-3):

"We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week when we couldn't that we wouldn't get 20 or 30 hours in. There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole summer.  This is when I was 15 and 16. Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center in the physics department. They were on a 24-hour schedule, but with this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything." Gates laughed. "I'd leave at night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University of Washington fromr my house. Or I'd take the bus. That's why I'm always so generous to the University of Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time."  (Years later, Gates's mother said, "We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.")

This petty cheating is hardly confined to computer programming, of course. My friend Nathan sent me this link to Werner Herzog explaining why he stole his first movie camera. These gray areas ranging from illegal activity to cheating to violating social norms are complicated and it's not always easy to draw a line between what's ultimately harmful or helpful to society.  

Ice & Rain

Walking to work Friday morning in Hyde Park was as hazardous a 4-block trip as I can ever remember.  There was a thin layer of ice on everything.  But this morning the temperature is already in the mid-50s and still climbing.

Rabbi Wolf Passes

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, leader at KAM Isaiah Israel for two decades, has died from a heart attack at the age of 84.  Rabbi Wolf was a steady crusader for social justice-- he was literally at Selma. 

Rabbi Wolf embodied the best of what Hyde Park & the University of Chicago are about and we should feel honored that he chose to live among us.

(Former Hyde Parker Dan Drezner remembers the late rabbi and includes the President-elect's statement of regret.)

Hitchhiking Via IPhone

Let's say you're driving from Point A to Point D.  Let's say there's someone else out there, somewhere, who wants to get from Point B to Point C.  As it happens, B & C are almost en route.  You've got wasted space in your car and the other person would rather not drive.  How can the two of you hook up and share expenses?

Well, the IPhone now has an app for that called Avego. 

Co-op to File for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy

Yes, the Board of the Hyde Park Co-op grocery store still is cleaning up almost a year after closing the business.  Joan Staples, President of the Board of Directors has issued the following statement:

Dear Friends and Co-op Members,
 
On December 8, 2008, the Board of Directors of the Hyde Park Co-operative Society voted to file for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy sooner rather than later.  We felt that it would, in the long run, be more efficient than doing the interim Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors process described at the Annual Meeting on October 19, 2008.

The Board will let members know when the formal filing takes place.
 
The Board also advises members that their shares are worthless.  Please consult your own tax preparers for their recommendations for declaring the loss on your tax returns.

I'm still on the board and I can tell you we considered several alternatives to Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but in the end this was the only practical way to wrap things up.  My understanding is that the Co-op's remaining assets, such as they are, will be turned over to a bankruptcy trustee for dispersal to creditors.

Freedom & Efficiency

I was up in Lincoln Square again on Saturday and got my picture taken in front of the piece of the Berlin Wall they have at the Western Avenue Brown Line stop, a hattip to what used to be a predominantly German-American neighborhood and a tangible reminder of the evils of totalitarian communism.  The colorful side you see in the pic faced West Berlin.  The other side is blank.  Graffiti wasn't worth getting shot over.

 I can also happily report that all 4 tracks are now in operation at the Belmont Red/Brown Line station.

LaHood Gets his Marching Orders

Via Ygleasias, President-elect Barack Obama explains why he chose Ray LaHood for Secretary of Transportation:

Few understand our infrastructure challenge better than the outstanding public servant I am asking to lead the Department of Transportation – Ray LaHood. As a Congressman from Illinois, Ray served six years on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, leading efforts to modernize our aviation system by renewing our aging airports and ensuring that air traffic controllers were using cutting edge technology. Throughout his career, Ray has fought to improve mass transit and invest in our highways. But he has not only helped rebuild our landscape, he has helped beautify it by creating opportunities for bikers and runners to enjoy our great outdoors.

It may well be that Ray LaHood has never lifted a finger to help bikers & runners in the past; I wouldn't know.  Thing is, the future president just made it clear what he's supposed to do as Secretary of Transportation.

I know President Obama is going to end up breaking my heart.  All living things eventually break your heart.  Some inanimate objects, too.  But I plan to enjoy every minute that the executive branch is run the way it should be.